Hilary Putnam's philosophical oeuvre has been called "the history
of recent philosophy in outline"-an intellectual achievement that
has shaped disciplinary fields from epistemology to ethics,
metaphysics to the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of
mathematics to the philosophy of mind. Naturalism, Realism, and
Normativity offers new avenues into the thought of one of the most
influential minds in contemporary analytic philosophy. The essays
collected here cover a range of interconnected topics including
naturalism, commonsense and scientific realism, ethics, perception,
language and linguistics, and skepticism. Aptly illustrating
Putnam's willingness to revisit and revise past arguments, they
contain important new insights and freshly illuminate formulations
that will be familiar to students of his work: his rejection of the
idea that an absolute conception of the world is obtainable; his
criticism of a nihilistic view of ethics that claims to be
scientifically based; his pathbreaking distinction between
sensations and apperceptions; and his use of externalist semantics
to invalidate certain forms of skepticism. This volume reflects
Putnam's latest thinking on how to articulate a theory of
naturalism which acknowledges that normative phenomena form an
ineluctable part of human experience, thereby reconciling
scientific and humanistic views of the world that have long
appeared incompatible.